If you find yourself in need of server provisioning, you probably need it badly. The ability to quickly deploy additional servers or to replace failed servers can be a crucial component of your efforts to keep business applications running. Add to this functionality the ability to keep a library of standardized servers (servers preconfigured to fill specific network roles such as file and print, email, or database serving), and you have a versatile tool that can save scarce IT manpower resources both when recovering from a failure and when expanding your business network. Server-provisioning tools can also be a stepping-stone toward more complete automation of your network server maintenance and monitoring. Let's take a look at two complex server-provisioning products: VERITAS Software's VERITAS OpForce 3.2 and Altiris Server Management Suite 6.0. (For a listing of other products that offer server-provisioning capabilities, see "Other Server-Provisioning Products.")
OpForce 3.2
OpForce, VERITAS's multiplatform server-provisioning software, is designed to speed up the deployment of server hardware with an emphasis on bare-metal provisioning both for new servers and for disaster-recovery purposes. This database-driven provisioning tool supports Red Hat Linux, SUSE Linux, IBM's AIX, Sun Microsystems' Solaris, and Windows Server platforms and includes the ability to detect and provision major vendors' blade servers.
The real power of this server-provisioning tool is its ability to quickly deploy a server—to go from bare metal to a functioning server in just the length of time necessary to get a server image onto completely unconfigured hardware. For companies that have standardized server configurations and hardware, this benefit is incredible.
OpForce creates a snapshot of a functioning server installation. That snapshot contains all the server's information, from every OS setting (and the OS) to all the installed applications and personalization information—the details that make up the server identity. This functionality lets OpForce restore a crashed server to new hardware, returning to the network a functional server that's as recent as the most current incremental snapshot. (After the software takes a full snapshot of a server, future snapshots are incremental and grab only the changes since the last snapshot.)
But you might be more likely to use this functionality to deploy new servers than to perform disaster recovery. You can use OpForce to create a library of snapshots that are essentially the default configurations of servers that play various roles in your network. Do you need a new mail server? Simply plug a bare-metal box into the network (as long as OpForce supports the hardware and the BIOS supports direct Preboot Execution Environment—PXE—boot), pull the mail server's basic configuration snapshot from the library, and blast it onto the new server. Once you have OpForce running and you've built your catalog of snapshots, it's really as easy as that.
Installation
OpForce is a complex product with a detailed feature set, but it's remarkably straightforward to install. Walking through the steps outlined in the thorough Windows Installation Guide (included as a PDF on the distribution CD-ROM), I was quickly up and running. The software prefers that its database run on the same computer, and although it will work correctly if you use an existing database server on another computer, the automated installation simplifies the installation of the version of PostgreSQL that ships with OpForce. (At press time, PostgreSQL is the only database that OpForce supports in the Windows environment.)
In my tests, running the database and provisioning software on the same server presented no problems. Then again, I wasn't provisioning a large corporate enterprise with hundreds or thousands of servers. In my test environment, installing OpForce on an older dual-Xeon server with 1GB memory and an available 76GB stripe set gave me more than adequate performance.
The first installation step was to install the database software. Because I elected to use the included PostgreSQL software, I simply let the included setup program install the database server software and configure it for use with OpForce. Launching the OpForce installer made me glad I chose to use the default PostgreSQL installation: All the default prompts for configuring the provisioning software's database access presume that you've installed the database locally. And although you can change every entry if necessary, simply accepting the defaults made this part of the installation quick and painless.
The next installation step was configuring Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) authentication. At this point, I cheated a bit. Although OpForce supports Active Directory (AD)—as well as Novell Directory Services (NDS) and Sun ONE Directory—I selected the Default Authentication option. This option uses the built-in OpForce user database to perform authentication. I would expect a corporate enterprise to use a directory service for authentication purposes, but for my testing the default model was sufficient.
The remainder of the installation is to simply create a Web server—which uses standard ports for communication—and permit the installer to copy all the files to the appropriate locations on the server and create the usual program groups and icons. Because I accepted all the defaults and used the most basic installation, the entire installation process was no more difficult than that of any simple piece of application software—not often the case with products that are this inherently complex.
Administration
You administer OpForce via a Web browser interface. In my case, I simply used the IP address of the OpForce server (i.e., http://192.168.1.154:8080) to access the administration console, which Figure 1 shows. The first time I accessed the console, the software required that I enter the product key for the Windows Server platform. This is a one-time event, but remember to keep your product key handy when completing the installation.
I don't have a huge network available to test all the provisioning features, but I could perform some basic testing. After running the server-discovery process on my small test network, I took a full snapshot of a server that had been running Windows 2000 Server for about 2 years. To determine how effectively OpForce could restore the running server, I shut down the server and replaced the disk drives with identical—but empty—hard disks.